There’s a question I hear in some form almost every week. Sometimes it’s asked outright. More often it hides inside a conversation about cash flow, a retailer that just discontinued an item, or a co-man pushing for higher MOQs.

Is this worth it?

I understand why people ask it. Building a CPG business has always been hard, and lately it feels like something else entirely. Since the pandemic, founders have been living through a hundred year flood every year. Supply chains broke. Inflation ate margins. Tariffs changed the math overnight. A conflict half a world away showed up in freight costs and ingredient prices. Every time you find your footing, the ground moves again.

And the asks keep growing. The market wants bigger businesses, and profitable ones. The days of growth at any cost are gone, and most of us are glad. But it means founders are being asked to lead for longer, carry more, and build something durable while the weather refuses to settle.

It’s just hard. I don’t think we say that out loud enough.

Here’s what is also true. As an industry, we are building better businesses than we ever have. They’re more disciplined, more thoughtful and more honest about what it takes. And what we do matters.

For a long time I didn’t have the words for why. My teammate and teacher Waven gave them to me.

We were talking about what makes this work different from building any other kind of company. He pointed out that our consumers put our products in and on their bodies. What they consume becomes part of them, all the way down to the microbiology. The yogurt, the nutrition bar, the lotion, the sparkling water. It doesn’t sit next to them. It becomes them.

And that, he said, is a sacred trust.

I’ve carried that idea with me ever since.

Think about the other things we buy. We have relationships with our cars, our phones and the software we use all day. Some of those relationships are even emotional. But none of those things become us. A phone never crosses into the self. The products this industry makes do that every day, in millions of kitchens and bathrooms and lunchboxes.

Hold that idea for a minute and the work starts to look different. The late night reworking the forecast. The hard conversation with a buyer. The reformulation that took eighteen months because you wouldn’t cut a corner on an ingredient. Those stop looking like problems in a spreadsheet. They start looking like the cost of keeping a promise.

It doesn’t make the work easier, and I want to be clear about that. Seeing it this way won’t fix your trade spend or soften a tariff.

But it makes the hardness feel justified.

I’ve watched this land with the founders I serve. Someone deep in the messy middle, tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix, wondering whether to keep going. Then we talk about who’s on the other end of their product. A parent reading a label in the aisle. A kid opening a snack at school. A person trying to feel a little better in their own body. And something in them steadies. The fatigue is still there, but now it has somewhere to go.

There’s a difference between suffering and sacrifice. Suffering is pain without meaning. Sacrifice is pain in service of something you’ve chosen to honor.

I think most founders in this industry are already living the second one. They just forget sometimes. I know I do.

So maybe the question isn’t whether this is worth it.

Maybe it’s whether you remember what you’ve been trusted with.